2 comments/reviews

But the greatest threat to Niemeyer’s remarkable legacy may not be the developer’s bulldozer or insensitive city planners, but Niemeyer himself.
It is not simply that his latest buildings have a careless, tossed-off quality. It’s that some of his most revered buildings — from the Brasília Cathedral to the grand Monumental Axis of the city itself — have been marred by the architect’s own hand. And this poses an uncomfortable dilemma: At what point do we — that is, the public that idolizes him, his government and private clients — have an obligation to intervene? Or is posing the question an act of spectacularly bad taste?
To those who pay close attention, the decline in the quality of Niemeyer’s work — whether resulting from a creative lull or complacency brought on by fame or old age — has been evident since he completed his Museum of Contemporary Art in Niteroi in 1996. Resting lightly on a single column at the edge of a cliff, its white saucer-shaped form looks best against the glamorous backdrop of Guanabara Bay.
What’s missing, however, is the lightness of touch that could draw you deeper into the work. The concrete surfaces are crude and unfinished; the structure lacks the careful refinement that gave his early buildings a textured significance and signaled that the architect cared deeply about the people who would inhabit them.
It’s as if the museum were designed by a lesser talent who could mimic the graceful lines in Niemeyer’s sketches but lacked the skill and patience to see the design through.
But if the art museum is an inferior work that mostly suffers in comparison with his early masterpieces, his midcentury projects in central Brasília are another matter: a trove of Modernist landmarks conceived on the grandest scale.

Completed in 1996, the Museu de Arte Contemporanea (MAC) hovers like a spaceship at the edge of a cliff face. Designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the MAC-Niterói is 16 meters high; its cupola has a diameter of 50 meters with three floors. The building itself sits above a 817-square meter reflecting pool on a cylindrical base “like a flower,” in the words of Niemeyer. However for such a famous landmark, the gallery is a huge disappointment. Not only was the exhibition at the time of visit dismal, the building is badly maintained and poorly finished – a factor of the low construction budget?
According to it’s website: It took five years to erect the structure of four floors, with 300 workers are rotated in three shifts. Para tanto, foram retiradas 5.500 toneladas de material em escavações e consumidos 3.200.000 m³ de concreto, quantidade suficiente para levantar um prédio de 10 pavimentos. For both, were withdrawn in 5500 tonnes of material excavated and consumed 3,200,000 m³ of concrete, amount sufficient to raise a building of 10 floors.
In a city with so much sub standard housing in Favelas, I was left with the impression that the time, money and materials could have been put to better use.